AAC and MP3 File Format

iTunes: Owned by Apple, the iTunes store set the pattern for a la carte music shopping and still reigns king over the customer base. iTunes has sold more than 5 billion songs to date, and it offers excellent integration with the world's best-selling MP3 player, the iPod. It's catalog contains more than 8 million songs as well as a variety of podcasts, TV shows, and movies. The one major bummer is that most of the tracks sold in iTunes can only be played on the iPod or iPhone and not any other MP3 player. You must download the iTunes software in order to access the store, but it works on both Windows and Mac operating systems.

AAC is the default audio format of Apple's iPhone, iPod and iTunes. Most of the music in iTunes Store is in AAC format. Sony PSP also adopts AAC as its audio standard format. However, AAC is not supported by all media players. If your media player is not compatible with AAC, especially the DRM protected AAC audio, you have to convert the AAC files to MP3 or WMA, or other unprotected audio formats that can playback on your audio player.

In April 2003, Apple Computer brought mainstream attention to AAC by announcing that its iTunes and iPod products would support songs in MPEG-4 AAC format (via a firmware update for older iPods). Customers could download music in a proprietary Digital Rights Management (DRM)-restricted form of AAC via the iTunes Store or create files without DRM from their own CDs using iTunes. In later years, Apple began offering music videos and movies, which also use AAC for audio encoding.

iTunes supports a "Variable bit rate" (VBR) encoding option which encodes AAC tracks in an "Average bit rate" (ABR) scheme. As of October 2007, Apple has still not added support for HE-AAC which is fully part of the MP4 standard or true VBR encoding to iTunes.Apple's iPhone supports AAC and FairPlay protected AAC files used as the default encoding format in the iTunes store.

Convert iTunes Protected AAC to MP3

NoteBurner AAC into MP3 Converter is an excellent audio conversion tool that can help you transcode AAC format to MP3, WMA and WAV formats. Working with iTunes, NoteBurner AAC to MP3 Converter can convert AAC to MP3, AAC to WMA and AAC into WAV.

NoteBurner AAC into MP3 Converter is able to convert iTunes M4P and M4A to WAV and unprotected WMA formats.

Utilizing virtual burning technology, NoteBurner AAC to MP3 Converter can also convert any DRM protected WMA, M4P music and M4B, MP3, rax, MP4, WAV, RA, snd, OGG, AIF music into unprotected MP3, WAV, WMA formats at fast speed and high quality.

NoteBurner AAC into MP3 converter allows the owner of protected audio files such as those purchased from Apples' iTunes to remove the DRM protection from the files and convert the files into audio formats such as MP3, WMA, WAV or AAC.

NoteBurner AAC into MP3 Converter installs a virtual CD-RW, it helps you burn any unprotected or DRM protected M4P, M4A, WMA music files onto the virtual CD, rips tracks on the virtual CD, encodes tracks onto MP3, WAV or WMA music files. It can repeat this audio converting procedure until your whole music collection is done.

NoteBurner AAC into MP3 Converter also helps make new media ready for inclusion in your media library. The title, artist and album name for every file are automatically stored in ID3 tags. NoteBurner makes sure that, after the re-recording process is over, the new files also have all existing tag information. NoteBurner AAC into MP3 Converter supports ID3-tag formats like ID3v1 and ID3v2. Normalization inside NoteBurner AAC into MP3 Converter ensures media is converted at the uniform volume level of the entire media collection.